Stanley described the donation as the largest gift to any higher education institution in the state and one of the largest to any public university in the nation.
Jim Simons is chairman of the Simons Foundation and hedge fund Renaissance Technologies and former chairman of Stony Brook’s Department of Mathematics.
Marilyn Simons is a Stony Brook alumna and president of the Simons Foundation.
Stony Brook announced the gift along with a $35 million challenge grant from New York state, a key component in the school’s NYSUNY 2020 plan.
This year, the Legislature and Mr. Cuomo enacted a law that allowed SUNY and the City University of New York to raise tuition by $300 a year for five years and also committed the state to maintaining its support for the universities. Full-time, in-state tuition at SUNY is set to climb to $6,170 in 2014-15, up from $4,970 last year, and for the first time, the system’s four main research campuses — Stony Brook, Binghamton, Albany and Buffalo — can also charge somewhat more than its smaller universities to out-of-state students.
Dr. Stanley said the Simons gift was being tailored to the areas in which Stony Brook lags noticeably behind the most prestigious public universities around the country: the student-to-faculty ratio, the number of endowed professorships and the life sciences.
“We want to be a top-25 research university,” he said. “There’s no reason why New York shouldn’t have that kind of flagship public university.”
Public universities generally raise far less money from donors than private universities do, but Mr. Simons said he saw support for public schools as vital, “especially in these days when private universities are so unbelievably expensive.” As for Stony Brook, he said, “We have a warm spot in our hearts for that particular institution.”
Marilyn Simons, the president of their foundation, went to Stony Brook as an undergraduate and received a doctorate in economics there. Mr. Simons, who earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from M.I.T. and a Ph.D., also in mathematics, from the University of California, Berkeley, was appointed chairman of Stony Brook’s math department in 1968.
But in 1978, he left academia for finance, becoming one of the first highly successful “quants” — quantitative analysts who use sophisticated math to guide investments. In 1982, he founded Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund firm; though he stepped down as chief executive two years ago, he remains chairman.
In October, Forbes magazine estimated his worth at $10.6 billion, making him the 30th wealthiest person in the country.
Now semi-retired, he spends more time on charitable work.
“It is fun,” he said, “but it’s not as much fun as it seems like it would be, since we have to say no a lot.
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